I have been acquainted with Mr. Yeats for a longer time than I have with any other man named in this book, but I seem to myself to know very little about him, for he is extraordinarily aloof from life. His aloofness is different from that of Mr. Galsworthy who is perturbed about mankind. Mr. Yeats is totally unconcerned about problems of any sort. He is more interested in the things men do than in men themselves. He prefers the symbol to the thing symbolized. The harshest condemnation I ever heard him utter was delivered on "A. E." of whom he said that he had ceased to be a poet in order to become a philanthropist! I met him last in Chicago, and I felt when we parted that I knew no more of him then than I knew when I first met him ten years earlier. Our meeting followed on the fact that I had sent a one-act play, entitled "The Magnanimous Lover," to him. It seems to me now to be a crudely-contrived, ill-written and violent piece, but when I sent it to Mr. Yeats I thought it was a remarkable work. It was performed after the production of Stanley Houghton's "Hindle Wakes" and Mr. Galsworthy's "The Eldest Son," which have similar themes, but was written several years before they were performed. One evening, a few weeks after I had sent the manuscript of "The Magnanimous Lover" to him, I received a letter from Mr. Yeats, written in that queer, illegible, thick style which is so difficult to read. Many of the words were incomplete: all of them were badly-formed. The contrast between the handwriting of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Yeats is remarkable. Mr. Shaw's is very clear and neat and most beautifully-shaped, as delicate as a spider's web, but Mr. Yeats's writing is obscure, untidy, sprawling and hard to decipher, looking as if it had been done with a blunt pen. Mr. Wells writes in a small, clean, but not very clear hand, a deceptive fist, for it seems easier to read than it is. There is some oddness in the fact that the handwriting of the poet should be so coarse and ungainly, while the handwriting of the dramatist, with so little of poetic emotion in him, is fine and shapely. The letter from Mr. Yeats was to say that he liked my play, but could not make a definite decision about it until he had consulted his co-director at the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory. It had the formal, distant tone which is characteristic of his speech and writing, but it had a postscript which gave me great pleasure. In this postscript, he said that my play was the only example of "wayward realism" that he had ever read. I did not quite understand what he meant by the phrase, but it was a compliment from a distinguished man and compliments from distinguished men had never come my way before. I have had many praising letters from him since then about my work, but none that ever raised me to such a state of dizzy delight as that first letter did. He told me, in another postscript, that he found in my "dialogue a quality of temperament, as distinguished from the usual impersonal logic. You have more than construction, and it is growing rare to have more." He thought highly of "John Ferguson"—so did Mr. Shaw and "A.E."—and when I was attacked in Dublin because of this play, I comforted myself with the thought that my betters liked what was denounced by my inferiors. Mr. Yeats wrote to me that "John Ferguson" was "a fragment of life, fully expounded and without conventionality or confusion. I think it is the best play you have done, though not likely to be the most popular." His criticism is especially valuable when it is adverse. I had written a play called "Mrs. Martin's Man" which I now know to have been a dreadful mess of motives. I sent it to Mr. Yeats in the hope that he would permit it to be done at the Abbey. He wrote lengthily to me about it, and when I had read his letter I put my play in the fire, though afterwards I used the theme, purged of the faults he had found in it, for a novel with the same title. "I believe," he wrote,

"I believe that the play is an error. I am very sorry indeed to say this, for I know what a blow it is to any dramatist to be told that about work which must have taken many weeks. Shaw has driven you off your balance, and instead of giving a vision of life, which is your gift and a most remarkable gift to have, you have begun to be topical, to play with ideas, to construct outside of life. Shaw has a very unique mind, a mind that is a part of a logical process going on all over Europe but which has found in him alone its efficient expression in English. He has no vision of life. He is a figure of international argument. There is an old saying, 'No angel can carry two messages. You have the greater gift of seeing life itself....'"

I print that extract from his letter, partly as a corrective to my own pride, but chiefly because of its commentary on Mr. Shaw. Later, in this chapter I will make specific reference to Mr. Yeats's relationship to Mr. Shaw's work, but here I may say that, in spite of his sincere regard and admiration for Mr. Shaw, Mr. Yeats seems to be totally incapable of comprehending his work. He is able to communicate with ghosts, but he cannot communicate with Mr. Shaw. He can understand astrologers and necromancers and spiritualists and thimble-riggers of all sorts and conditions, but he cannot understand Mr. Shaw. He told me on one occasion of an experience he had with a medium, a young girl who differed from all other mediums known to him in being a member of the upper class. The spirits, seemingly, prefer to communicate their messages through the lower orders. This girl's family were ashamed of her cataleptic powers and tried to conceal them from their neighbours, but they were persuaded to permit Mr. Yeats to see her in a trance. "While she was in the trance," he said to me, "her fingers closed on her palm. Then they opened again, and I saw a small green pebble in the centre of her palm!" That was all! Immortal souls had disturbed the harmony of the universe and thrown a young girl of the upper class into a trance in order that they might place a small green pebble in the centre of her palm! And Mr. Yeats saw something wonderful and significant in that performance, but is unable to see anything significant in the work of Mr. Shaw. That to me is a thing so incomprehensible that I have abandoned all attempts to understand it. But all of this is digression and anticipation. Soon after I had received the letter in which he praised my "wayward realism," I heard from Mr. Yeats again. He invited me to call on him on the following Sunday evening at his rooms in Woburn Buildings, behind the Euston Road, in London; and thither, in a state of some excitement, I repaired. I had no trouble in finding the house, for Mr. Yeats, who, in some ways, is much more precise and clear-minded than people imagine or his handwriting indicates, had given me very explicit directions how to get to it, and had even drawn a rough sketch of the neighbourhood so that I should not fail to find him. Woburn Buildings consists of a number of tall houses in a narrow passage off Southampton Row, and running parallel with the Euston Road. It is a dingy, dark place, with an air of furtive poverty about it, and on Sunday nights it is depressing enough to fill a man's mind with plots for drab dramas. I have heard that H. G. Wells thought of the plot of that clever, devilish story of his, "The Island of Dr. Moreau," in the Tottenham Court Road on a Bank Holiday when he was in a mood of discontent. I believe that the whole of the "drab drama" was first conceived on Mr. Yeats's doorstep!

Shops form the ground floor of these houses, little, huckstering shops that just contrive to support their proprietors, and Mr. Yeats's rooms were on the third and fourth floors of a house which had a cobbler's shop on the ground floor. The cobbler was a pleasant, bearded man, wearing spectacles who had some share in the management of his affairs; for when one, unable to obtain admission to the poet's rooms, required information about him, the cobbler invariably supplied it. He could tell whether Mr. Yeats had gone to Ireland or was merely taking the air, and when he was likely to return, and he would offer, with great courtesy, to take a message from you to be faithfully delivered to him on his arrival.

Mr. Yeats has poor and failing sight, and in the dusk of the Sunday evening on which I called on him, he could barely discern me. He stood in the hall, holding the door, looking very tall and dark, and said in that peculiar, tired and plaintive voice of his, "Who is it?" and I answered "St. John Ervine." There is always something conspiratorial about the manner in which he admits you to his rooms. You felt that you want to give the countersign.

"Oh, yes!" he said, without any interest, and bade me enter.

In one of his books, he writes that life seems to him to be a preparation for something that never happens; and the quality of his voice suggests that thwarted desire which is expressed in so much of his work. He is, in poetry, what Mr. Galsworthy is, in fiction: he surrenders to life. I do not know of any one who can speak verse so beautifully and yet so depressingly as he can. The very great beauty that is in all his work does not stir you: it saddens you. There is no sunrise in his writing: there is only sunset. In his lyrics, there is the cadence of fatigue and of the lethargy that comes partly from disappointment, partly from loneliness, partly from doubt, and partly from inertia. "Innisfree," the beauty of which has not been diminished by familiarity, does not sound glad: it sounds tired. The poets wish to return to the lake island is not due to any pleasurable emotion, but to weariness and exhaustion: he dreams of the island, not as a place in which to work and to achieve, but in which to retire from work and achievement that has not brought with it the gratification for which he hoped; and the final impression left on the mind of the reader is that the poet is too tired and disappointed to do more than wish that he might go to Innisfree. One reads the beautiful poem in the sure and certain belief that Mr. Yeats will not "arise and go now, and go to Innisfree," but that he will remain where he is. There is no impulse or movement in the poem: there is only a passive wish and a plaintive resignation.

And all that inertia and negation and inactive desire is sounded in his voice. It is very palpable in his manner.

He warned me not to make a noise as I ascended the uncarpeted stairs: the people on the second floor might be disturbed. They were working-people, I understood, and either there was a fretful baby asleep or the people retired early because they had to rise early, and he did not wish to break their rest. Yeats can be very harsh and inconsiderate with his associates, but his bearing to poor men and women, in my experience, is very courteous and very considerate. He could not have been more gracious to a duchess—he probably was sometimes less gracious to a duchess—than he was to the middle-aged woman who cooked his meals and kept his rooms clean. I have seen distinguished men being gracious to poor, unlettered men, but most of them had an air of ... not exactly condescension in doing so, but of altering their attitude slightly, of relaxing and unbending, of modifying their style, as it were, and making it simpler. I did not observe any effort at condescension in his manner towards that plain and simple woman. He spoke to her in the same way that he would speak to "A. E." or to Lady Gregory. I suppose that Queen Victoria was the only woman in the world to whom Yeats ever spoke in a condescending fashion.

II

He is a tall man, with dark hanging hair that is now turning grey, and he has a queer way of focussing when he looks at you. I do not know what is the defect of sight from which he suffers, but it makes his way of regarding you somewhat disturbing. He has a poetic appearance, entirely physical, and owing nothing to any eccentricity of dress; for, apart from his neck-tie, there is nothing odd about his clothes. It is not easy to talk to him in a familiar fashion, and I imagine that he has difficulty in talking easily on common topics. I soon discovered that he is not comfortable with individuals: he needs an audience to which he can discourse in a pontifical manner. If he is compelled to remain in the company of one person for any length of time, he begins to pretend that the individual is a crowd listening to him. His talk is seldom about common-place things: it is either in a high and brilliant style or else it is full of reminiscences of dead friends. I do not believe that any one in this world has ever spoken familiarly to him or that any one has ever slapped him on the back and said "Helloa, old chap!" His relatives and near friends call him "Willie" but it has always seemed to me that they do so with an effort, that they feel that they ought to call him "Mr. Yeats!" I doubt very much whether he takes any intimate interest in any human being. It may be, of course, that he took less interest in me than he took in any one else for I am not a very interesting person; but I always felt that when I left his presence, it was immaterial to him whether he ever saw me again or not. I felt that, on my hundredth meeting with him, I should be no nearer intimacy with him than I was on my first meeting. My vanity has since been soothed by the knowledge that he has given a similar impression regarding themselves to other people who know him better than I do. I have seen him come suddenly into the presence of a man whom he had known for many years, and greet him awkwardly as if he did not know what to say. He never offers his hand to a friend: he will often stand looking at one without speaking, and then bow and pass on, with perhaps a fumbled "Good evening!" but never with a "How are you?" or "I'm glad to see you!"

It is, I suppose, the result of some natural clumsiness of manner. He has trained himself to an elegance of demeanour, an elaborate courteousness, which is very pleasing to a stranger, but he has spent so much time in achieving this elegance that he has forgotten or never learned how to greet a friend.

He was expecting other people to come to his rooms that Sunday evening.... I remember he mentioned that Madame Maud Gonne McBride was expected to arrive in London from Paris on her way to Ireland, and might call on her way to Euston Station ... but no one else came. He talked to me about my play and told me that he liked it very much, but that Lady Gregory did not greatly care for it. "She is a realist herself," he said, "and all realists hate each other. Synge would have disliked your play, and Robinson does not like it, but I do!" (Lennox Robinson, himself a dramatist, was then manager of the Abbey Theatre.) He asked me if I had written any other plays, and I told him that I was half-way through a four-act play, called "Mixed Marriage," and I described the theme of it to him. He urged me to complete this play and bring the MS. to his rooms and read it to him. "The difficulty about 'The Magnanimous Lover,'" he said, "is that it may provoke some disturbance among the audience, and as our patent expires shortly we do not wish to give the authorities any ground for refusing to renew it. They were very angry over our production of Bernard Shaw's 'Blanco Posnet' after the Censor refused to license it in England. We'll leave the production of 'The Magnanimous Lover' until the patent has been renewed. If your new play were ready, we could do it first and create a public for you!..."

Mr. Yeats is one of the best advertising agents in the world, and I did not doubt his ability to "create a public" for me, although I thought that Lady Gregory would probably be more skilful even that he could be. When one remembers that she has established a considerable reputation as a dramatist on two continents entirely on the strength of half-a-dozen one-act plays, it is impossible to doubt that she is at least as skilful as he in drawing attention to herself. A great amount of their advertising energy has, of course, been expended on the Abbey Theatre and the Irish Literary Renaissance, and a great many Irish writers, myself included, have derived advantage, personal and pecuniary, from their activities. It would have been better for us, perhaps, if Mr. Yeats had employed his critical ability more freely than his eulogy on our work. There is an immense amount of creative power in Ireland, but it is raw, untutored, tumid stuff, and because the critical faculty in Ireland is almost negligible, this creative power is wasted in violent explosive plays and books or violent, explosive beliefs.

I have always believed in the interdependence of all men and minds. It seems to me that an ill-conceived, foolish political scheme must in some manner react on every other department of man's life, and that the labourer who is doing his job badly in a remote village is in some measure adversely affecting the welfare of his countrymen miles away. Violent, crude plays are inevitable in a land of violent, crude beliefs; and it is, I think, not without significance that some of the most violent, crude plays in the Abbey repertory were written by dramatists who professed the violent, crude beliefs of Sinn Fein. When one thinks of the generosity and courage and nobility of many of the Sinn Feiners, it is hard not to lose faith in human perfectibility when one considers how foolish are the political schemes they devise. If men so good and exalted as these men are can produce schemes so stupid and sometimes so cruel, how can we hope for any progress in the world when we remember how many bad men there are? And have we not seen how men of lofty ideals can tumble into cruelty and become brutal ruffians in the name of patriotism?

III

But there is an explanation of all this crudity and violence in Ireland. For all sorts of reasons, political, social, historical and religious, the critical faculty has rarely been employed and certainly has not been developed. Either you are for a thing or you are against it. Doubt is treated as if it were antagonism. Reluctance to commit oneself to any scheme however fantastic or ill-considered it may be, is treated as treason to the national spirit. A man who asserts his belief in the establishment of an Irish Republic, by force, if necessary, is an Irishman, even though he be a "dago," and any one who is doubtful of the feasibility of this proposal is denounced as a West Briton, an anglicised Irishman, even, on occasions, as "not Irish at all," although his forbears have lived in Ireland for generations. The state of affairs in Ireland is not unlike the state of affairs in Russia, where literary criticism, as a Russian writer has stated, has always tended to be the handmaid of political faction. "Any writer of sufficient talent" says a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, "who adopted a liberal attitude was certain of the appreciation of the intelligentsia's acknowledged critical leaders, and hence of a wide and enthusiastic audience. But writers whose instinct for the truth led them to doubt the sufficiency of doctrinaire discontent with the established order were debarred from the aids to literary advancement, and had to struggle against the grain of popular, and even academic, valuation."

It is even worse than that in Ireland, for there, generally speaking, there is hardly any criticism at all, although there is plenty of abuse. In great measure this lack of criticism is due to the fact that all the mind of Ireland has been obsessed by the demand for, or the opposition to, self-government. There has not been any reality in Irish electoral contests for a great many years. Until the growth of Sinn Fein, there seldom were any contests at all. Candidates for parliament were nearly always returned unopposed. Contests, if there were any, were between one Nationalist and another, concerned with matters of detail and not with matters of principle, or, at the most, between a Nationalist and a Unionist, concerned with the advocacy of, or opposition to, Home Rule. Sinn Fein has, indeed, brought a contest to every constituency, but even here the contest is concerned with the old obsession, self-government in one form or self-government in another: Home Rule within the British Commonwealth or a Republic outside it. If one considers that this obsession was nearly always expressed in bitter language, it is not difficult to understand how deplorable its effects have been on the general life of the Irish people. It has temporarily incapacitated them from judging any proposition in a sane and dispassionate fashion; and so the critical faculty in Ireland has languished until at times one fears that it has decayed.

Mr. Yeats is a great creative artist: he is also a great critic. Had he chosen to do so, he could have had an enormous influence on the minds of his countrymen. His pride in his craft, his desire for perfect work, his contempt for subterfuges and makeshifts and ill-considered schemes, his knowledge and his skill, all these would have affected the faith and achievements of his countrymen, imperceptibly, perhaps, but very surely. It is unfortunate that he was not appointed to the Chair of Literature in Trinity College, Dublin. I know that he wished to receive this appointment and was disappointed that he did not receive it. The mind that might have disciplined and developed the imagination of young Irishmen was rejected by Trinity College, and it has turned to tiresome preoccupation with disembodied beings, to table-turning and ouija-boards and the childish investigation of what is called spiritual phenomena, but is, in fact, mere conjurer's stuff.

IV

I saw Mr. Yeats many times after that first visit. He told me that he was always at home to his friends on Monday evening, and he invited me to dine with him on the Monday immediately following the Sunday on which I first met him. No one came on that evening. He talked about acting and the theatre, and I said something that pleased him, and he complimented me in his grave, courteous manner. "That was well said," he exclaimed, and I flushed with pleasure. The praise of one distinguished man is more than the applause of a multitude of common men. His talk about the theatre, though interesting, was often remote from reality. He was then interested in the more esoteric forms of drama, and was eager to put masks on the actors' faces. He wished to eliminate the personality of the player from the play, and had borrowed some foolish notions from Mr. Gordon Craig about lighting and scenery and dehumanised actors. He had a model of the Abbey Theatre in his rooms and was fond of experimenting with it. There was some inconsistency in his talk about acting: at one moment he was anxious for anonymous, masked players, "freed" from personality, and at the next moment, he was demanding that players should act with their entire bodies, not merely with their voices and faces. Hazlitt, advocates anonymity on the stage, and when one considers how excessive is the regard paid to-day to the actor in comparison with that paid to the play, one is tempted to support Hazlitt's demand; but I have never understood why one should decline to exploit a personality that is rare.

There is a school of thinkers which holds that the best theatre is that one in which a player may be the hero of the piece to-night and the "voice off" to-morrow night. This is a ridiculous theory. Even if it were practicable, which it is not, it would be a disgraceful waste of material. The manager who consented to a proposal that Madame Sarah Bernhardt should play the part of the servant with one line to say would be an ass and a wastrel. It is, perhaps, unfair to treat a man's "table-talk" as if it were a serious proposal, and I once got into trouble with Mr. Gordon Craig for doing this; but so much of Mr. Yeats's talk and writing is related to this matter of disembodiment and passionless action, that it is difficult not to treat it seriously. For my part, I have always been unable to understand how it is possible for a human being to behave as if he were not a human being.

Most of the talking was done by Mr. Yeats, and he talked extraordinarily well. He is one of the best talkers I have ever listened to, in spite of the fact that his conversation tends to become a monologue. But if you cannot talk well yourself, you are wise to listen to a man who can. He spoke at length about the men who had been his friends when he was a young man: of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons and Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson; of Henley and Whistler and Mr. Bernard Shaw and of a host of others. He had a puzzled, bewildered admiration for "that strange man of genius, Bernard Shaw," but I never felt that he understood Mr. Shaw or was happy with Mr. Shaw's mind. He could not make head or tail of "John Bull's Other Island" when he read it in MS. Mr. Shaw, in a debate with Mr. Belloc, which I had heard a night or two before the meeting with Mr. Yeats, had said "I am a servant," and this statement pleased Mr. Yeats very much. He was moved by the humility of it. Mr. Shaw, however, hardly entered into Mr. Yeats's early life, and most of the talk that evening was about Beardsley and Wilde and Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson and the members of the Rhymers' Club. "Most of them," he said, "died of drink or went out of their minds!"

It was late when I prepared to leave him. He had been saying that a man should always associate with his equals and superiors and never with his inferiors, when I recollected that the hour was late and that I might miss the last tram from the Thames Embankment and so have to walk several miles. I was tired, too, and a little depressed, for he seemed to be a lonely man and an uneasy man. He had survived all his friends, but had not succeeded in making any intimacy with their successors. I sometimes feel about him that he is a lost man wandering around looking for his period. When I had announced that I was going home, he astonished me by saying that he would walk part of the way with me. He had not had any exercise all day and felt that he needed some air and movement. (He hates open windows and always keeps his tightly closed.) We walked to the Embankment together, saying little, for silence had fallen on him, and walked along it for a short while. I said some banal thing about Waterloo Bridge, but he did not make any answer; and I did not speak again, but contented myself with observing the difference between his walk when he is moving slowly and his walk when he is moving quickly. He is very dignified in his movements when he walks slowly: he holds his head erect and carries his hands tightly clenched behind his back; but when he begins to move quickly, the dignity disappears and his walk becomes a tumbling shuffle. That, I suppose, is because of his poor sight.

My tram came along, and I said "Good-night" to him, and he answered "Good-night" in a vague fashion. I think he had completely forgotten me.

V

He had told me that he was going on the following day to Manchester to lecture to some society there, and I was sufficiently interested in his opinions to get a copy of the "Manchester Guardian" containing a report of what he had said. I was amused to find that his lecture was a repetition of all that he had said to me on the Monday before the day on which he lectured. He had "tried it on the dog," and I was the dog. All his speeches are carefully rehearsed before they are publicly delivered. He told me once that Oscar Wilde rehearsed his conversation in the morning and then, being word-perfect, went forth in the evening to speak it. I imagine that he does that, too, on occasions. It is a laudable thing to do in many respects, although it tends to make talk somewhat formal and liable to be scattered by an interruption. When Mr. Yeats rehearses a speech before making it in public, he is paying a great tribute to his audience by declining to offer them scamped or hastily-contrived opinions. Those who listen to him may be deceived into believing that he is speaking spontaneously, but they may be certain that what he says has been carefully considered, that he is speaking of things over which he has pondered and not just "saying the first thing that comes into his head."

Most men of letters do something of this sort. I have listened to Mr. Moore saying things which I subsequently read in the preface to the revised version of one of his novels; and I remember meeting "A. E." in Nassau Street, Dublin, one evening and being told a great deal about co-operation which I read in his paper, "The Irish Homestead" on the following morning.

I saw Mr. Yeats many times after that. I completed the MS. of "Mixed Marriage" and, much embarrassed, read it to him in his rooms. I read it very badly, too, and I am sure I bored him a great deal; but he was kind and patient and he made some useful suggestions to me which I did not accept. I had too much conceit, as all young writers have, to be guided by a better man than myself. I know now that I should have done well to take his advice. He warned me against topical things and against politics and urged me to flee journalism as I would flee the devil; and he advised me to read Balzac. He was always advising me to read Balzac, but I never did....

VI

My memories of those days when I first knew him begin to be disconnected, and I find myself putting down things which happened after other things which I have still to relate; but I have never found a consecutive narrative very interesting, which, perhaps, is why I cannot read Pepys' Diary or Evelyn's Diary. I like to take things out of their turn, to go forward to one thing and then back to an earlier thing. I can only connect one incident or memory with another by taking them out of their order and doing violence to the natural sequence of things. Life is not so interesting when all the factors between 1 and 100 are in sequence as it is when 26 and 60 are taken out of their place and put into coherence, temporary or permanent, with each other.

He said to me one evening that a man does not make firm friendships after the age of twenty-five. There is a good deal of truth in that statement, but I doubt whether it is generally true. It is true of him, for his mind turns back continually to the men who were his contemporaries twenty-five years ago, but it was not true of Dr. Johnson, who shed his friends as he grew in stature of mind. And perhaps what Dr. Johnson said to Sir Joshua Reynolds is more generally true than what Mr. Yeats said to me. "If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair." I do not think that anything is so remarkable about Mr. Yeats as his aloofness from the life of these times. He has very little knowledge of contemporary writing. I doubt whether he has read much or even anything by Mr. H. G. Wells or Mr. Arnold Bennett or Mr. John Galsworthy or Mr. Joseph Conrad. He said to me one night that after thirty a man ought to read only a few books and read them continually. Some one had said this to him—I have forgotten who said it—and he passed on the advice to me; but he added, after a while, that "perhaps the age of thirty is too young," and suggested that the age should be raised to forty. It seemed very wrong advice to me.

An active mind will surely keep itself acquainted with new books and familiar with old books. I have heard many men, particularly schoolmasters and classical scholars, say with pride that they never read modern books. Such people boast that when a new book is published, they read an old one. They are, in my experience, dull people, sluggardly in mind, and pompous and set in manner. In many cases, particularly if they are schoolmasters, they neither read new books nor old ones. Dr. Johnson and his friends, however, appear to have been familiar with all the current literature of their time: history, fiction, poetry, drama, philosophy and theology; as well as with the ancient writings. They would not have boasted of their ignorance of the work of their contemporaries. In Mr. Yeats's case, however, this unfamiliarity with the work of men writing to-day is explainable when one remembers that he cannot read easily because of his sight. When I first knew him, a friend came several times a week to read to him out of a copy of the Kelmscott Press edition to William Morris's "Earthly Paradise."

He had, like most young men of his time, been much influenced by William Morris, the only man for whom I ever heard him profess anything like affection, but I remember hearing him say once that he no longer got pleasure from reading or listening to Morris's poetry.

VII

One night, I was at his rooms when Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, the historian and biographer of Garibaldi and John Bright, was present with his wife, a daughter of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Mr. Yeats talked much and well, and I remember his story of a dream he had had. He often told stories of his dreams, but some of them smelt of the midnight oil. A friend of his, he said, was contemplating submission to the Catholic Church. He had tried to dissuade her from this, but she went away to another country in a state of irresolution. One night, he dreamt that he saw her entering a room full of beautiful people. She walked around the room, looking at these beautiful people who smiled and smiled and smiled, but said nothing. "And suddenly, in my dream," he said, "I realized that they were all dead!" "I woke up," he proceeded, "and I said to myself, 'She has joined the Catholic Church,' and she had." Mr. Trevelyan thought that the description of the Catholic Church as a room full of beautiful people, all smiling and all dead, was the most apt he had ever heard. He chuckled with contented anti-clericalism. Another night, when I was in his rooms, Miss Ellen Terry's son, Mr. Gordon Craig, came to see him; and a model of the Abbey Theatre was brought down from his bedroom to the candle-lit sitting room, where Mr. Craig experimented with lighting effects. Mr. Craig is a man of genius, but he is a very difficult and childish person, whose view of the theatre is nearly as damnable as that of the most vain of the lost tribe of actor-managers or their successors, the shop-keeper syndicates. Scenery and lighting effects were of greater consequence to Mr. Craig than the play itself! His designs for scenery were very beautiful, indeed, but they were suitable only to romantic and poetical plays.

I remember that when he had manipulated Mr. Yeats's model theatre to his liking, he stood back from the scene, and said, "What a good thing it would be if we were to take all the seats out of the theatre so that the audience could move about and see my shadows!" Mr. Yeats dryly replied that this was hardly a practical proposal. I was irritated by Mr. Craig's remark which was in keeping with his general theory of the theatre. It seemed to me that he would, were he less difficult to work with, be as great a nuisance and danger to drama as any actor-manager in London. Sir Henry Irving and Sir Herbert Tree, turning the attention of the audience away from the play to the player and the scenery, were not any worse than Mr. Craig, anxious to turn the attention of the audience to his shadows. I was glad when this remarkable man was carried off by Mr. Albert Rutherston and Mr. Ernest Rhys to exhibit himself somewhere else.

Mr. Yeats was bitten with Mr. Craig's theories about lighting and scenery, and a large sum of money for so poor a theatre as the Abbey, was spent on some of his "screens" for use in plays like "Deirdre." They were never used for anything else. When I went to Dublin to manage the Abbey, I was very anxious that we should employ a competent scene-builder to make some good "sets" for us, but Mr. Yeats said that scenery was of no consequence: the dirty hovel which we always employed to represent an Irish cottage or farm house would do well enough. I thought there was some oddness in this opinion when I remembered that the theatre had been almost bankrupted in order to purchase "screens" for occasional performances of his own one-act plays. He would spend hours in rehearsing the lighting of a scene for one of them: this "lime" was too strong and that "lime" was too weak or there was too much colour or there was not enough or the mingling of colours was not sufficiently delicate. One day, when he had worn out the patience of every one in the theatre, with his fussing over the lighting, he suddenly called out to the stage-manager, "That's it! That's it! You've got it right now!" "Ah, sure the damned thing's on fire," the stage-manager answered.

VIII

I have written already that he is not happy with an individual: he must have an audience; and I remember now something that he said to me which supports my belief. We had been talking about Synge and his habit of listening at key-holes and cracks in the floor in order to hear scraps of conversation that he might put into his plays. I said I had been told that Synge, though excessively shy and silent in company, was a very companionable person with an individual. He was a good comrade on a country road, talking easily and naturally, and had the gift of friendliness with plain and simple people. Labourers and countrymen would talk to him as easily as they talked to one another, and would confide in him. I wondered whether there were as many entertaining tales to be heard from working-people in England as were to be heard from working-people in Ireland. Mr. Yeats thought that perhaps there were. He told me that the woman who cooked his meals and cleaned his rooms had begun to tell some story of a love affair to him, but that he had been too diffident to encourage her to go on with it. He thought that if he had talked to her more than he had, she would have told him many stories of her youth in the country; but all his talk to her had been of food and household things. He is not a man in whom poor men and women confide. His civility to them is magnificent, but it overawes them and makes them as uneasy in one way as it pleases them in another. He is an excellent entertainer in a crowded room, but he is a poor companion on a road. He can talk well to a company of educated men and women, but he is tongue-tied in the presence of those who have little learning. When I survey my acquaintance with Yeats, I find strangely diverse thoughts rising in my mind. I am drawn to him and repelled by him. He stimulates me and depresses me. I am moved by the beauty of his work and distracted by its vagueness. I find in his writing and in his speech, great spiritual loveliness but curiously little humanity, and I have often wondered why it is that while Irishmen, even such as I am, are deeply moved by his little play, "Kathleen ni Houlihan," men of other countries—not only Englishmen—are left unmoved by it, unable, without a note in the program, to understand it. I have seen this play performed very many times. I never missed seeing it, when it was done at the Abbey during the time that I was manager there. It moved me as much when I last saw it as it did when I first saw it; and I do not doubt that if I live to be an old man, it will move me as much in my old age as it has moved me in my youth. But it does not move men of other races. That is a singular thing. It denotes, I suppose, that while there is much that is national in Mr. Yeats's work, there is less that is universal.

One rises from his work, as one comes from his company, with a feeling of chilled respect that may settle into disappointment. It is as if one had been taken into a richly-decorated drawing-room when one had hoped to be taken into a green field. I have read Blake's poems and then I have read his and sought to see the resemblance that I am told is between them, but have not always found it. Blake wrote about things that he felt, but Mr. Yeats writes about the things that he thinks; and thought changes and perishes, but feeling is permanent and unchangeable; thought separates and divides men, but feeling brings them together; and it may be that Mr. Yeats's aloofness from men is due to the fact that he thinks too much and feels too little.

IX

I think of him as a very lonely, isolated, aloof man. He is, so far as I am aware, the only English-speaking poet who did not write a poem about the War, a fact which is at once significant of the restraint he imposes upon himself and of his isolation from the common life of his time. I have never met any one who seems so unaware of temporary affairs as Mr. Yeats, and this unawareness is due, not to affectation, but to sheer lack of interest. He probably would not have known of the War at all had not the Germans dropped a bomb near his lodgings off the Euston Road. When Macaulay's New Zealander comes to examine the ruins of London, he will probably see Mr. Yeats, disembodied and unaware that he is disembodied or that London is in ruins, sitting on a slab with a planchette. He is younger than Mr. Shaw by ten years, but might be ten years older. His verse and his speech and his manner are all elderly, and his conversation is composed chiefly of reminiscences of men who have been dead for many years, so that one imagines he has not had a friend since 1890. There is absolutely no suggestion of youth in his writings. In the poem entitled, "To a Child Dancing in the Wind," he says:

and again:

I do not know what age Mr. Yeats was when he wrote those lines, but they are included in a collection of poems, dated "1912-1914," and at most he could not have been fifty, for he was born in Dublin in 1865.

The sense of age seems to have oppressed his mind for many years, perhaps for the whole of his creative life. He feels that he has outlived his generation and is lost in a period of time peculiarly alien to him.

This coldness closing on his heart and congealing all his generous emotions, causes him, at the end of a graceful book, "Reveries Over Childhood and Youth" (in itself, significant of the age-obsession which possesses his mind) to declare that "all life, weighed in the scales of my own life, seems to me a preparation for something that never happens," and leaves his readers wondering why a man who began his life by singing songs with such airs "that one believed he had a sword upstairs" should stumble into dismal prose towards the end of it, pronouncing life to be a cheerless deceit.

His effect on young men is peculiar. His brilliant conversation is very attractive to them, but his insensibility to the presence of human beings repels them. "A. E." once told me that Mr. Arthur Griffith, the founder of the Sinn Fein movement, drew young people to him by the strength of his hatred, but finally repelled them by his complete lack of charity and love. A nature compounded principally or exclusively of hatred must be destructive. No man can construct anything unless love and charity predominate in his heart. Mr. Griffith, throughout his career, has never been notable for his power to make things. He could not even make his own movement grow, for Sinn Fein became a popular and appealing force only after Padraic Pearce and Thomas Macdonagh and James Connolly had put a fire into the machinery of it on Easter Monday, 1916. There is something terribly ironical in the fact that James Connolly, to whom Mr. Griffith offered every possible opposition in his lifetime, should by his death have helped to put Mr. Griffith in a position of authority to which his own intellectual and spiritual qualities could never have raised him. Mr. Yeats has something of the unhumanity of Mr. Griffith. His talk is brilliant, indeed, but it is not comradely talk. It never lapses from high quality to the easy familiarities which humanize all relationships. He is more fastidious about his speech than he is about his friends. It would shock him more to use a bad word than to make a bad friend, because he is more aware of bad words than of bad men; and he would be quicker to forgive a crime than to forgive a vulgar phrase. I have never heard him use a common expression. He once repeated an angry speech of William Morris to me with an air almost apologetic for using profane language, not because it was profane but because it was inelegant. He never says "Damn!" or "Blast!" when he is angry.... He is one of the loneliest men in the world, for he cannot express himself except in a crowd. Dr. Stockman said that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands absolutely alone—a feat which is surely impossible—and this specious statement has supported many ineffective egoists in their belief that neurosis is strength and misbehaviour a sign of individuality. But the penalty of isolation is that the isolated cannot dispense with an amenable crowd. The hermit must have a succession of respectful pilgrims to his cave, each one murmuring, "There is but one God and Thou art His Prophet!" until at last the hermit begins to believe that he is God and God is his prophet. Hermits have followers, or, perhaps one ought to say, curious visitors, but they have no friends. Why should they have friends? They have not got the social sense nor can they take part in the common labours of mankind. They live in caves and desert places because they are not fit to live in houses and places that are inhabited. But even the hermits, wrapped in self-sufficiency, realize that no man is effective without his fellows, and so, though they cannot make friends, they make disciples. This is a truth which all the great lonely men from Adam to Robinson Crusoe have discovered, that a man by himself is ineffective and without interest. Life for Adam remained uneventful until the arrival of Eve: the island of Juan Fernandez was livelier after Man Friday came to keep Crusoe company. For fellowship is life, as Morris said, and lack of fellowship is death.

There is no poet, not even Keats or Shelley, who has so much of pure poetry in his work as Mr. Yeats has in his, and perhaps that is enough; but there is no other poet, not even Mr. Kipling, who has so little understanding of human kind. It is an odd commentary on his relationship to his countrymen that while he was writing the bitter poem, entitled "September, 1913," with the desolating refrain:

Thomas Macdonagh and Padraic Pearse and James Connolly were preparing themselves for a romantic death.

John Davidson, in a book called "Sentences and Paragraphs," writes of Keats that, "beginning and ending his intemperate period with the too ample verge and room, the trailing fringe and sample-like embroidery of 'Endymion,' he was soon writing the most perfect odes in the language." Mr. Yeats, in spite of some reluctant instructions into enthusiastic movements, escaped "the intemperate period"; but he did so at the cost of his youth and ardour. Like the Magi in his poem of that name, he, "being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied," seeks "to find once more" "the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor"; but it eludes him, and will always elude him, because he thinks of its habitation as "a bestial floor." It can only be found by a poet who, whatever happens, still believes that the earth is a place where God may yet walk in safety. Mr. Yeats is the greatest poet that Ireland has produced, but he has meant very little to the people of Ireland, for he has forgotten the ancient purpose of the bards, to urge men to a higher destiny by reminding them of their high origin, and has lived, aloof and disdainful, as far from human kind as he can conveniently get.